Sample size isn't as big of a deal-breaker as the layperson may think. If the mechanism of action is well understood and the potency of the effect is strong, you don't need a big sample size. For an extreme but apt example of this: how many people really need to be beheaded to prove that it kills someone to a reasonable degree?
The relevant statistic is not how many people die, it's how many people die in a short time window. The probability of a particular person dying in a 5 minute interval after being beheaded is much larger than the probability of a particular person dying in an interval after they were not beheaded.
Yeah I think it really reveals a breakdown in our ability to quantitively model the intuitive notion of "causality".
A targeted public health intervention that prevented beheadings just at the time of beheading would clearly break the link in the causal change. This result is insensitive to any imaginable confounders. However, the executioner would find another strategy, say a gunshot or noose, which did not appear anywhere in our dataset.
Really makes you question the validity of observational studies. At least when acts of government are concerned.
Yes the answer is more than 1, but because the mechanism of action is so well understood and the temporal association so strong the answer is less than 10.
Sure, if you measure the time surrounding the beheading, it's obvious, but if you expand the time range far enough, then you find out that everybody dies whether they're beheaded or not and suddenly it looks irrelevant.
Hengist et al publish a toy paper where they fed 14 guys pizza and ran a blood panel. Sure, why not. Probably took an afternoon, and was real cheap to do, gave some of his grad students publication credits and LaTeX experience. We learn that eating a pizza will not instantly give you diabetes, or make you obese, which we already knew. This, by itself, is fine.
Separately, the University of Bath has a press office which is required to issue a certain number of press releases per year, even when the research isn't interesting. Again, no real problem. Plenty of press releases are issued with nobody ever reading them. If the University of Bath wants to employ people to do nothing useful, that's their own business.
This press release is submitted to HN and gets a bunch of upvotes. Problem. People in the comments try to generalize the study. Big problem!
The paper had no followup, no dose schedule, tiny experimental groups... because it wasn't trying to solve obesity!
Nobody knows what's causing the obesity epidemic. There are many hypotheses, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results.
There is no reliable way to lose weight.1 There are many diets that work for some people, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results.
This is a nice little toy study. I don't doubt the data or the results. I just don't think it's useful. And studying obesity certainly isn't like running a randomized clinical trial on if beheading will kill a person!
---
1: Yes, if you lock someone in a cage and not give them food, they will lose weight. Obviously. Once you release them back into modern society, they will regain that weight.
Correct me if I'm wrong but that is false. It seems pretty well known and accepted that caloric intake below BMR will make you lose weight. Your BMR might fluctuate, but if you take that into account there shouldn't be a problem.
Going back into society and resuming your previous eating habits (before the cage) will ofc make you gain weight because your BMR will have lowered during your starvation.
It shouldn't be terribly surprising that we do OK with "feast and famine", especially if you're young. I remember being 16 and eating an entire large NY pizza for an afternoon snack before dinner...
I assert without proof that it's the all-feast-all-the-time dietary novelty for most of humanity in the last, oh, 200 years that probably throws a spanner in the works.
Another complication is that most of our ancestors would probably only have been "feasting" on meat - there wouldn't have been any bread, sugar, palm oil, etc. in the mix.
I'm not sure that's correct. Honey and fruit feasts are both quite common among extant forager groups in Africa. I don't see why our ancestors wouldn't have made use of the same resources.
that's at best a very contentious claim. Midden heaps tend to preserve bones longer than carrot-tops, though, which certainly skews the record.
Certainly the vast majority of humanity throughout written history -- numerically, the bulk of our ancestry -- has subsisted primarily on non-meat foods, be they wheat, barley, maize, or whatever. Peasants were not regularly eating meat; often we have the written record to point to for that, as well as archaeological evidence from grave finds and the like.
and my usual critique of "paleo" holds here, which is that it ignores evolution. As a species, we've evolved the persistence of digesting lactose at least twice, in independent subgroups, through two different metabolic pathways, so it's not like we're incapable of getting used to dietary shifts over the span of human history.
My addition is purely anecdotal, but I've noticed in my family that it's the overweight members who make the most noise about overeating on holiday meals. It seems to me that they're not fat because of overeating during the holidays, they're fat because they overeat all year.
> Hormones that are released by the gut
to stimulate insulin secretion and increase
feelings of fullness were changed the most by
overeating (e.g. GLP-1 and peptide YY).
I wonder if people who chronically overeat (hello!) develop insensitivity to these hormones, leading to a cycle where it becomes harder to eat the correct amount. Similarly, I wonder if people who tend to eat too little are hyper-sensitive to them, making it hard to gain weight.
I once worked with a biochemist that works on diets and he told me that the body "forgets" how to process carbs after a couple of days. If you only indulge in carbs once a week it won't be able to process it, much like the cheat day thing from Tim Ferris.
I don't remember the exact technical mechanism he described and quite frankly I don't know if it's true... but there you go.
> I wonder if people who chronically overeat (hello!) develop insensitivity to these hormones, leading to a cycle where it becomes harder to eat the correct amount.
Sounds like Leptin Resistance. [0]
I wonder if I have that. When I see that my rather sedentary lifestyle means I'm only supposed to eat 2,000 calories a day, I don't see how the hell that's possible without constant hunger. Even if I eat a diet rich in protein and fiber, which is supposed to make me feel fuller longer, I'm still always hungry. I can eat a 20 oz ribeye with a large side of broccoli and wheat rolls (A meal that's likely 1500+ calories) and still be hungry in only 2-3 hours. If I eat something in the 600 calorie range, like a 10 oz chicken breast and veggies, I'll be hungry again in an hour, if I ever even feel full at all.
Meanwhile, I know a couple people that say "I eat like a lion and I can't gain weight!" then discover that they'll cook up an 8 oz filet and sides and be full without even eating it all.
What I am taking from this...is that fullness isnt a quantitative measure...such as caloric consumption...or physical intake but more of a mindset. Our bodies are probably adapted to fluctuating inputs. Our minds are however trained to constant inputs. I feel like staying busy and saying no are the best way to shed weight. I could be just speaking from personal experience though.
I'm like that (I'm skinny and get full very easily - even tho I'm still careful because I'm 40 and any weight I gain now will be increasingly hard to lose), and my friend started gaining weight when he moved to the US a few years ago and it seems his appetite just keeps getting bigger, and he tends to snack right after eating dinner, which I find basically impossible.
I keep a bag of raw carrots in the fridge to help with this for myself.
The other aspect I've found is with periodic fasting, these urges tend to go away for me. I remember being extremely lethargic before dinner when I had a worse diet (lots of carbs). These days I can easily got 16 hours without any loss of energy.
Not sure if that's just changing my diet to be less sugar/carbs or if it is because I exercise more. Either way, I don't struggle with extreme hunger very frequently anymore.
Have you tried focusing on eating more fat? That’s probably the most important satiety macronutrient. I add avocado oil to lots of meals to get more fat in my diet.
The 20 oz ribeye meal example is going to have plenty of fat.
I started a keto diet about a year ago, which has a decent amount of fat. My breakfast is often a Keto Chow shake, which has 47g fat, 9g fiber, 33g protein, and about 600 calories. Some users of Keto Chow report feeling full for hours. I drink one and will still want more.
That’s interesting. Maybe a fast would reset things for you. Other ideas I would try would be probiotics.
I recently started fasting (2-3 days every two weeks) and it’s been working pretty well. It seems way less miserable than running a calorie deficit every day. I eat normally the other days but I do have to be vigilant not to overeat.
Honestly I should just bring it up with my doctor. I'm due to get my A1C rechecked anyways to see how a year of keto has been. After 4 months of keto, my A1C went from 6.4 to 5.6!
If it only happened while working, certainly I'd attribute it to being bored. But no, it happens even when I'm playing games with my friends and having a blast.
Yeah, I literally will never feel full from cereal and milk. I'm not a fast eater, which is probably part of it, but one time I tried to fill up on cereal. It was around lunch time that I ran out of cereal after two full boxes.
I had a friend in college who was trying to gain weight, so he copied me with what he put on his tray. The completely expected result was that I finished his food after he was full.
(disclaimer: I'm just medically-curious, no accreditation) It's the cause of so much disease, insulin resistance. It's a common thread in the last few years in the research I think, for heart disease & diabetes & fatty liver & metabolic syndrome etc. I think it's like >10% of all people have metabolic syndrome now.
It causes issues with the gut, promoting inflammation and that "chubby" appearance you see. It's not all fat--lots of that is simply inflammation of the gut.
You've given me a chance to put some useless information to use, oh boy!
So the article mentions GLP-1, but the primary hormones responsible for hunger and satiety are leptin and ghrelin.
Leptin is an anorexic hormone that is produced by adipose tissue. It regulates metabolism, particularly resting/basal metabolic rate. An interesting thing that you'll find with bodybuilders and competetive athletes, is that when you cross into single-digit bodyfat, it becomes significantly more difficult to continue to lose fat.
Some people attribute this to a phenomena known as "adaptive thermogenesis", which is the idea that your metabolism adapts and regulates itself based on your lifestyle and environmental factors, so that you don't continue either losing/gaining weight forever.
But the major contributing factor is that with diminished adipose tissue, systemic production of leptin is severely reduced and this lowers both metabolic rate and lipolysis.
(You can artificially restore leptin production and re-induce lipolysis in a low-bodyfat state through a short window (~36 hours) of carbohydrate overfeeding)
On the other side of the coin, you have Ghrelin. Ghrelin is a peptide produced in the stomach, and is pretty solely involved in appetite stimulation.
If you've ever taken GHRP (Growth-Hormone-Releasing-Peptide) or Ibutamoren Mesylate (oral growth hormone secretagogue), It will drive you ravenously hungry. A side effect of the peptides/hormones many athletes take for growth hormone production is the release of Ghrelin and a massive appetite, which is great if you're trying to bulk but also tends to make you incredibly tired.
So there you go. Bunch of useless information.
----
If anyone is curious, this paper does an astounding job of summarizing the useful bits on Leptin + Ghrelin:
I would imagine the same persistent problem with human physiology -- which is the tendency towards homeostasis.
Human body is remarkable in responsive to disturbances in balance. You can generally throw things off a fair degree before the systems behind whatever you've thrown off adapt and scale down responses.
Generally when you see things in the extreme in humans, somewhere in the line there's a malfunction in regulation that allowed that state to be reached (or chemical intervention, e.g. anabolic steroids, substance abuse, etc).
Almost anything will work for a little, but the only thing that works forever are things that can become lifestyle factors.
There are a handful of exceptions for "magic diet pills", but please for the love of god don't listen to what I'm about to say below as anything more than science:
- Phentermine
- [Rx but can outright buy it from "Medical Spas" pretty cheap (how is this legal?)]
Stimulatory appetitete suppressant, effects are essentially amphetamine minus the dopaminergic activity (no high, sorry)
----
- Sibutramine
- [Rx, Phentermine's little brother]
----
- 2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP)
- [Not legal for sale, but you can buy it online if you're determined]
It's what's called a "mitochondrial uncoupler". It disrupts the Krebbs Cycle so that resynthesis of ATP from ADP becomes incredibly inefficient, and it expels the discarded energy as heat.
This is the holy grail of fatloss. You can lose 1.0-1.5lbs of pure adipose tissue (not water/glycogen) per day.
But the excess heat will cause you an incurable, agonizing death if you overdose.
Also makes you hot all day, probably dangerous if you work in the heat.
DNP was one of the first anti-obesity medications, and was widely prescribed in the 1930s.
It's use was discontinued, not actually due to overdose and death by heat, but because in some women it had a chance of causing cataracts, and if you're overly susceptible to oxidative stress/damage it can cause peripheral neuropathy.
These effects are generally mitigated through supplementation efforts with anti-oxidants though.
I have no hard data to give you, only anecdote. But ever since I've consciously tried to reduce the quantity and frequency of my meals, I feel like my 'stomach has shrunk'. It's most likely something like what you're describing, as I don't literally believe my stomach has shrank, but there may be something to that folk phrase.
Back in 2012 I lost 12 kg in about 3 months by counting calories to get to my ideal weight, it was pretty hard as I was still eating breakfast + lunch + dinner and trying to squeeze my calories around the day.
Fast-forward some years, 2015-16 I wanted to drop 5 kg during winter but wasn't very keen on counting calories again, I started skipping breakfast and having late lunch, unaware of intermittent fasting schemes, restricting myself to eat between 3pm-9pm made it much, much easier to control my hunger pangs. After a week or two I didn't wake up hungry anymore, at all, the hunger feeling was much easier to control and forget about.
To this day I don't really feel very hungry during a day, at least not in the way I would feel before where I needed to eat, would get quite irritable and so on. I've forgotten to eat proper meals during days I've been active just because the hunger doesn't really bother me, it's a pretty good feeling to be honest.
This makes sense to me since early humans hunted large game. Also, feasting seems to be present in some form in almost all human cultures. If it really were harmful, I would expect some cultures to have figured that out.
Is this really that interesting? Overeating doesn’t appear to affect blood sugar beyond regular eating in healthy adults - seems normal to me. Lipids didn’t spike after a single meal - also seems normal. All they found is that these are linear up to the point of satiety and then the body’s hormones keep levels in check beyond that.
Why this anti-intellectualism? Are studies only worth doing or reading if you personally find the results surprising? If we don't have data about something, we should get it, rather than just assuming our intuitions are correct.
I’m not being, or at least intending to be, anti-intellectual. I do think that a study confirming something this obvious is not notable or interesting enough to be at the top of HN though
I personally agree that you're not being anti-intellectual, and that your original question was valid.
That said, I think there's huge value in studies that scientifically validate things we believe to be true to 'common knowledge' (because often common knowledge is totally wrong), which justifies this study being at the top of HN.
Considering how little we actually understand scientifically about these processes, nearly any good study (not a judgement on this paper) would seem to be worth doing.
I guess it's the difference between science and news. We can do all kinds of confirm common belief science, but maybe it's not worth the HN thread when common beliefs are upheld?
I really love going to Fogo de Chao, but it's hard not to overindulge. The worst I've ever felt in my life was after a trip to Fogo. An hour later I was still just sitting up straight on my couch trying not to look as uncomfortable as I felt. Took a while before I went back again, and I had a lot more control.
> Four hours after eating maximally, the participants [...] reported no desire to eat anything else, including sweet foods. This was surprising because reward centres in the brain are usually food specific, so eating pizza might not be expected to change the desire for sweet food.
No it's not surprising because - whether it's contrary or not the neurodrivel "reward centres in the brain" i'm not sure - as an adult you know that craving for a specific food item is entirely a high-level construction in your psychology to do with the story you're telling yourself about what it will mean to eat that, etc. and you should have experienced that it will go away as soon as you eat enough of anything else.
"The researchers acknowledge that their study involved healthy young men, so they plan to investigate whether similar effects are apparent in women, and for overweight and older populations."
By definition this would be hard to test with an overweight population. The reason they're overweight is because their calorie indulgence is not one-off.
This was a big thing with Tim Ferris when he was making an argument for "cheat days". Personally, I also found cheat days to be effective when on a restrictive diet. I think he ended up actually weighing his poop to prove the point.
I did notice that I couldn't breakthrough some key weight loss levels without both cheat days and intermittent fasting, with the cheat days seeming counter-intuitive to me.
You can also find this anecdotally by talking to competitive eaters. They will almost all tell you that as long as you eat a regular amount of calories most days they have no problem with weight gain from binge eating once or twice a week. AKA there is there is a difference between eating 2000 calories 6 days a week and 6000 one day than eating 2500 calories 7 days a week.
This makes sense to me given a layperson's understanding of biology and evolution. In modern times, food is plentiful. Throughout history, it was not: people often had to eat what was on hand, and make use of as much of the available calories present when they had the opportunity.
I'm also curious if there's any research done on things we get from binge eating that are not calories. Do we see a similar uptake of nutrients? Is eating less efficiently from a calorie perspective still beneficial in evolutionary terms if we get something else (vitamins, minerals, etc)?
I don't know the details behind it but I can imagine a number of factors.
- Inability of us to efficiently consume large quantities of food so we pass more calories than we would for smaller levels.
- Changes to metabolism to adjust.
I think at the end of the day it is still calories in/calories out but you may be taking in less than go in your mouth and may be using more than you usually would.
It's called homeostasis. This is the reason why it's hard to lose weight and keep it off. Your body has "set points" that it creates, and it takes a consistent effort to push your body off of that set point and dig a groove into a different one.
I have AYCE sushi scheduled monthly as part of lifting routine, and notice overcompensation that day has no real long term consequences. Body will either eat less or shit more in the following days. I track calories as well and will definitely end the week with AYCE surplus, which never makes it to scale weight.
Back when I worked out 6 days a week, cardio and weights, I'd do the binge meal for one dinner a week. I'd eat whatever the heck I wanted and have a beer or two. It was a good way to not feel like your depriving yourself.
That said, I'd usually notice the scale went up the next morning by 3-5 lbs. It was pretty much water weight from the carb overload and it went away after a couple days.
Yeah, a few days of incredible water bloat from extra carbs = exploit schedule for extra cushion on squat days.
Otherwise, all things normalized like calorie + pedometer for NEAT + morning weigh in trend suggest thousands of indulgence calories just goes straight the colon. If I spread the extra calories over weekdays, I will gain weight. If I skip fiber, the food will stay around (=more absorption?) and I will gain weight. I've also done big weekly binges a few years ago to similar affect. 6000 calories over 3-4 meals just doesn't account get registered on the scale at the end of the month. Had to stop due to heartburn :-/.
So are "one-off calorie indulgences" okay because they're smaller in scale than long term over eating, or because they're not frequent? In other words, is eating 3000 more calories for one meal, once per month worse/better/equal for you than eating 100 more calories every day?
I suspect that either your gut bacteria, or general homeostasis, don't make permanent changes based on one-off indulgences. I even think that bingeing gives you psychological safety to eat fewer calories -- your body "knows" it will catch up eventually, so it doesn't demand you get 2400 calories every single day. This is just my experience as someone who eats a full bag of Doritos/peanut butter cups every 3-5 days and got to middle age without getting fat.
Body can only consume X amount of calories from the food you eat every day (just like any other process/machine it has its upper limit), and the rest will be thrown out without being digested. That's why short bursts of high calorie intake won't result anything more than the X amount. However reaching that upper limit everyday will add up to weight gain.
I was wondering about this myself for some time now. I haven't been able to find any research regarding the amount of food/energy/calories that human body is able to digest.
For example: I eat 10 buns with butter. How much of this food will be digested by my body and how much will 'go through' and not be converted into energy? What's the ratio? Is there even a ratio or everything we eat we eventually digest?
Dietary fiber is known to be largely undigested, (the microbes in your intestine will feed off of them). Your body is really efficient at pulling nutrients from simple carbohydrates and fats. I forget what happens to excess protein though.
Some commenters here are misinterpreting the headline/article -- the study does NOT say you won't gain weight!
It mainly just says your blood sugar won't spike, which is entirely expected ("managed to keep the amount of nutrients in the bloodstream within normal range"). Emphasis added:
> "Specifically, those tested in this study were able to efficiently use or store the nutrients they ingested during the pizza-eating challenge, such that the levels of sugar and fats in their blood were not much higher than when they ate half as much food. The main problem with overeating is that it adds more stored energy to our bodies (in the form of fat)..."
This just confirms the conventional understanding of how our bodies work. The raised insulin levels quickly convert excess blood sugar into glycogen and fat.
A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting this headline as meaning you won't gain weight from a single meal. This study does NOT support that conclusion!
Only twice as much? I'm quite surprised, when I used to go to AYCE buffets I could easily push it to 3-4 times to make it worth the money, twice as much would not be worth the money.
No surprise, TBH. For thousands of years prehistoric humans didn't eat similarly sized meals N times a day every day. They ate whenever and whatever they could hunt/catch. Which means huge meals after days/weeks of hunger only to have days/weeks of hunger again. No wonder our bodies are well adapted to such irregularities.
87 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 85.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
A targeted public health intervention that prevented beheadings just at the time of beheading would clearly break the link in the causal change. This result is insensitive to any imaginable confounders. However, the executioner would find another strategy, say a gunshot or noose, which did not appear anywhere in our dataset.
Really makes you question the validity of observational studies. At least when acts of government are concerned.
Sure, if you measure the time surrounding the beheading, it's obvious, but if you expand the time range far enough, then you find out that everybody dies whether they're beheaded or not and suddenly it looks irrelevant.
In OP's paper, I'm not sure if they met this criteria.
Hengist et al publish a toy paper where they fed 14 guys pizza and ran a blood panel. Sure, why not. Probably took an afternoon, and was real cheap to do, gave some of his grad students publication credits and LaTeX experience. We learn that eating a pizza will not instantly give you diabetes, or make you obese, which we already knew. This, by itself, is fine.
Separately, the University of Bath has a press office which is required to issue a certain number of press releases per year, even when the research isn't interesting. Again, no real problem. Plenty of press releases are issued with nobody ever reading them. If the University of Bath wants to employ people to do nothing useful, that's their own business.
This press release is submitted to HN and gets a bunch of upvotes. Problem. People in the comments try to generalize the study. Big problem!
The paper had no followup, no dose schedule, tiny experimental groups... because it wasn't trying to solve obesity!
Nobody knows what's causing the obesity epidemic. There are many hypotheses, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results.
There is no reliable way to lose weight.1 There are many diets that work for some people, all with holes and strange contradictions. There have been many gigantic studies, all with inconclusive results.
This is a nice little toy study. I don't doubt the data or the results. I just don't think it's useful. And studying obesity certainly isn't like running a randomized clinical trial on if beheading will kill a person!
---
1: Yes, if you lock someone in a cage and not give them food, they will lose weight. Obviously. Once you release them back into modern society, they will regain that weight.
Correct me if I'm wrong but that is false. It seems pretty well known and accepted that caloric intake below BMR will make you lose weight. Your BMR might fluctuate, but if you take that into account there shouldn't be a problem.
Going back into society and resuming your previous eating habits (before the cage) will ofc make you gain weight because your BMR will have lowered during your starvation.
I assert without proof that it's the all-feast-all-the-time dietary novelty for most of humanity in the last, oh, 200 years that probably throws a spanner in the works.
Certainly the vast majority of humanity throughout written history -- numerically, the bulk of our ancestry -- has subsisted primarily on non-meat foods, be they wheat, barley, maize, or whatever. Peasants were not regularly eating meat; often we have the written record to point to for that, as well as archaeological evidence from grave finds and the like.
and my usual critique of "paleo" holds here, which is that it ignores evolution. As a species, we've evolved the persistence of digesting lactose at least twice, in independent subgroups, through two different metabolic pathways, so it's not like we're incapable of getting used to dietary shifts over the span of human history.
I wonder if people who chronically overeat (hello!) develop insensitivity to these hormones, leading to a cycle where it becomes harder to eat the correct amount. Similarly, I wonder if people who tend to eat too little are hyper-sensitive to them, making it hard to gain weight.
I don't remember the exact technical mechanism he described and quite frankly I don't know if it's true... but there you go.
Sounds like Leptin Resistance. [0]
I wonder if I have that. When I see that my rather sedentary lifestyle means I'm only supposed to eat 2,000 calories a day, I don't see how the hell that's possible without constant hunger. Even if I eat a diet rich in protein and fiber, which is supposed to make me feel fuller longer, I'm still always hungry. I can eat a 20 oz ribeye with a large side of broccoli and wheat rolls (A meal that's likely 1500+ calories) and still be hungry in only 2-3 hours. If I eat something in the 600 calorie range, like a 10 oz chicken breast and veggies, I'll be hungry again in an hour, if I ever even feel full at all.
Meanwhile, I know a couple people that say "I eat like a lion and I can't gain weight!" then discover that they'll cook up an 8 oz filet and sides and be full without even eating it all.
[0] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/leptin-101
The other aspect I've found is with periodic fasting, these urges tend to go away for me. I remember being extremely lethargic before dinner when I had a worse diet (lots of carbs). These days I can easily got 16 hours without any loss of energy.
Not sure if that's just changing my diet to be less sugar/carbs or if it is because I exercise more. Either way, I don't struggle with extreme hunger very frequently anymore.
Hope that anecdote helps!
I started a keto diet about a year ago, which has a decent amount of fat. My breakfast is often a Keto Chow shake, which has 47g fat, 9g fiber, 33g protein, and about 600 calories. Some users of Keto Chow report feeling full for hours. I drink one and will still want more.
I recently started fasting (2-3 days every two weeks) and it’s been working pretty well. It seems way less miserable than running a calorie deficit every day. I eat normally the other days but I do have to be vigilant not to overeat.
If it only happened while working, certainly I'd attribute it to being bored. But no, it happens even when I'm playing games with my friends and having a blast.
I had a friend in college who was trying to gain weight, so he copied me with what he put on his tray. The completely expected result was that I finished his food after he was full.
It causes issues with the gut, promoting inflammation and that "chubby" appearance you see. It's not all fat--lots of that is simply inflammation of the gut.
So the article mentions GLP-1, but the primary hormones responsible for hunger and satiety are leptin and ghrelin.
Leptin is an anorexic hormone that is produced by adipose tissue. It regulates metabolism, particularly resting/basal metabolic rate. An interesting thing that you'll find with bodybuilders and competetive athletes, is that when you cross into single-digit bodyfat, it becomes significantly more difficult to continue to lose fat.
Some people attribute this to a phenomena known as "adaptive thermogenesis", which is the idea that your metabolism adapts and regulates itself based on your lifestyle and environmental factors, so that you don't continue either losing/gaining weight forever.
But the major contributing factor is that with diminished adipose tissue, systemic production of leptin is severely reduced and this lowers both metabolic rate and lipolysis.
(You can artificially restore leptin production and re-induce lipolysis in a low-bodyfat state through a short window (~36 hours) of carbohydrate overfeeding)
On the other side of the coin, you have Ghrelin. Ghrelin is a peptide produced in the stomach, and is pretty solely involved in appetite stimulation.
If you've ever taken GHRP (Growth-Hormone-Releasing-Peptide) or Ibutamoren Mesylate (oral growth hormone secretagogue), It will drive you ravenously hungry. A side effect of the peptides/hormones many athletes take for growth hormone production is the release of Ghrelin and a massive appetite, which is great if you're trying to bulk but also tends to make you incredibly tired.
So there you go. Bunch of useless information.
----
If anyone is curious, this paper does an astounding job of summarizing the useful bits on Leptin + Ghrelin:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-789X...
Human body is remarkable in responsive to disturbances in balance. You can generally throw things off a fair degree before the systems behind whatever you've thrown off adapt and scale down responses.
Generally when you see things in the extreme in humans, somewhere in the line there's a malfunction in regulation that allowed that state to be reached (or chemical intervention, e.g. anabolic steroids, substance abuse, etc).
Almost anything will work for a little, but the only thing that works forever are things that can become lifestyle factors.
There are a handful of exceptions for "magic diet pills", but please for the love of god don't listen to what I'm about to say below as anything more than science:
- Phentermine
- [Rx but can outright buy it from "Medical Spas" pretty cheap (how is this legal?)]
Stimulatory appetitete suppressant, effects are essentially amphetamine minus the dopaminergic activity (no high, sorry)
----
- Sibutramine
- [Rx, Phentermine's little brother]
----
- 2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP)
- [Not legal for sale, but you can buy it online if you're determined]
It's what's called a "mitochondrial uncoupler". It disrupts the Krebbs Cycle so that resynthesis of ATP from ADP becomes incredibly inefficient, and it expels the discarded energy as heat.
This is the holy grail of fatloss. You can lose 1.0-1.5lbs of pure adipose tissue (not water/glycogen) per day.
But the excess heat will cause you an incurable, agonizing death if you overdose.
Also makes you hot all day, probably dangerous if you work in the heat.
It's use was discontinued, not actually due to overdose and death by heat, but because in some women it had a chance of causing cataracts, and if you're overly susceptible to oxidative stress/damage it can cause peripheral neuropathy.
These effects are generally mitigated through supplementation efforts with anti-oxidants though.
Back in 2012 I lost 12 kg in about 3 months by counting calories to get to my ideal weight, it was pretty hard as I was still eating breakfast + lunch + dinner and trying to squeeze my calories around the day.
Fast-forward some years, 2015-16 I wanted to drop 5 kg during winter but wasn't very keen on counting calories again, I started skipping breakfast and having late lunch, unaware of intermittent fasting schemes, restricting myself to eat between 3pm-9pm made it much, much easier to control my hunger pangs. After a week or two I didn't wake up hungry anymore, at all, the hunger feeling was much easier to control and forget about.
To this day I don't really feel very hungry during a day, at least not in the way I would feel before where I needed to eat, would get quite irritable and so on. I've forgotten to eat proper meals during days I've been active just because the hunger doesn't really bother me, it's a pretty good feeling to be honest.
That said, I think there's huge value in studies that scientifically validate things we believe to be true to 'common knowledge' (because often common knowledge is totally wrong), which justifies this study being at the top of HN.
No it's not surprising because - whether it's contrary or not the neurodrivel "reward centres in the brain" i'm not sure - as an adult you know that craving for a specific food item is entirely a high-level construction in your psychology to do with the story you're telling yourself about what it will mean to eat that, etc. and you should have experienced that it will go away as soon as you eat enough of anything else.
[0] https://particle.scitech.org.au/food/always-have-room-for-de...
I. AM. SHOCKED.
I did notice that I couldn't breakthrough some key weight loss levels without both cheat days and intermittent fasting, with the cheat days seeming counter-intuitive to me.
I'm also curious if there's any research done on things we get from binge eating that are not calories. Do we see a similar uptake of nutrients? Is eating less efficiently from a calorie perspective still beneficial in evolutionary terms if we get something else (vitamins, minerals, etc)?
It certainly violates calories in/calories out. But I’m ok with that. We’re not steam engines.
Can your intestines stop adding sugar to your bloodstream?
- Inability of us to efficiently consume large quantities of food so we pass more calories than we would for smaller levels. - Changes to metabolism to adjust.
I think at the end of the day it is still calories in/calories out but you may be taking in less than go in your mouth and may be using more than you usually would.
Back when I worked out 6 days a week, cardio and weights, I'd do the binge meal for one dinner a week. I'd eat whatever the heck I wanted and have a beer or two. It was a good way to not feel like your depriving yourself.
That said, I'd usually notice the scale went up the next morning by 3-5 lbs. It was pretty much water weight from the carb overload and it went away after a couple days.
Otherwise, all things normalized like calorie + pedometer for NEAT + morning weigh in trend suggest thousands of indulgence calories just goes straight the colon. If I spread the extra calories over weekdays, I will gain weight. If I skip fiber, the food will stay around (=more absorption?) and I will gain weight. I've also done big weekly binges a few years ago to similar affect. 6000 calories over 3-4 meals just doesn't account get registered on the scale at the end of the month. Had to stop due to heartburn :-/.
For example: I eat 10 buns with butter. How much of this food will be digested by my body and how much will 'go through' and not be converted into energy? What's the ratio? Is there even a ratio or everything we eat we eventually digest?
It mainly just says your blood sugar won't spike, which is entirely expected ("managed to keep the amount of nutrients in the bloodstream within normal range"). Emphasis added:
> "Specifically, those tested in this study were able to efficiently use or store the nutrients they ingested during the pizza-eating challenge, such that the levels of sugar and fats in their blood were not much higher than when they ate half as much food. The main problem with overeating is that it adds more stored energy to our bodies (in the form of fat)..."
This just confirms the conventional understanding of how our bodies work. The raised insulin levels quickly convert excess blood sugar into glycogen and fat.
A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting this headline as meaning you won't gain weight from a single meal. This study does NOT support that conclusion!